Contemporary Circus Education當代馬戲教育

ART.ZIP: What makes your project different from education offered within a university structure?

JE: The first thing to say is that there are a small number of Higher Education circus schools and that you can go there to do accredited degree courses, MAs, even PhDs. In the UK there’s the National Centre for Circus Arts and a school called Circomedia; abroad there are places like DOCH（Dans och Cirkushögskolan, University of Dance and Circus）in Sweden or CNAC (Centre National des Arts du Cirque) in France. Still, at a lot of these schools students concentrate on technical skill and performance disciplines (dance, movement, physical theatre, and so on) but perhaps don’t learn so much about aesthetics – about what’s going on in the world, about the history of their art form, where contemporary circus came from, where it’s going next, these sorts of things… And there’s no textbook to teach that, no documentary series – we wanted to create the course because we felt there was nothing else like it. We were aiming to produce a resource that the circus sector could use in its education programmes, but at the same time we’d like to bring it to a larger performing arts market: there are a lot of universities which teach performing arts courses and cover other branches of performance (dance, physical theatre, puppetry, and so on) without touching on circus.

JE: At the moment we’re working to complete a ten-lesson course that can fit within circus school curriculums, but we’re also thinking about a shorter version that can be offered to a general audience – so an absolute basic introduction to what contemporary circus is and where it came from. Given that it’s an online course our ideal would be to reach as many people as possible and to have an impact on the way contemporary circus is seen in general society.

ART.ZIP: What other projects are you working on?

JE: I’m working with the photographer Ben Hopper on his project Duende – which is his attempt to capture ‘el duende’, which you can think of as being a little bit like the soul of a great performer. I’m doing some writing to go alongside that and thinking about how to present the project online. Another project I’m working on for Sideshow is called Deconstructing Circus. It is a six-month project to publish videos of 30 scenes from 30 contemporary circus productions. Each video is accompanied by an interview with the production’s artists or directors, and through these readers can get an insight into the various facets of contemporary circus.